It’s a marathon: 50,000 words of prose, the majority of words for an 80,000-word standard mainstream novel. I’m at a little over 24,000 words this morning. Why am I doing this? Because writing is bliss and marketing a book is hell. Undergoing the process of trying to get a literary agent, who then tries to get your book a publisher, who then takes more than a year to publish it — that’s anyone’s definition of…
If you have an addiction to writing like I do (and a writer by definition is an addict), perhaps like me you can’t contain it within just one literary genre. I began with poetry, getting swept up first in the poems of the haiku poets Basho, Buson, and Issa. Issa (Kobayashi Issa 1763-1828, one of the Big Four of Japanese haiku) charmed me with tiny masterpieces that evoked a stunning attention to the natural world,…
I can’t claim that my twelve potted roses have been dessicated over the past three years, but California surely has been dessicated. I’ve worried about friendly trees and watched lawns become weed patches. So early this morning, the sound of a steady, soaking rain (as we used to call it back when we had rain) was pure Chopin to my ears. It induced in me a kind of quiet I haven’t felt for months. A…